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[WoW] How I learned to stop worrying and love pet battles

Readers, I was not the greatest fan of pet battles in Mists of Pandaria. Oh, I had completed the opening questline in Orgrimmar and gone out and caught a few low level wild pets locally, tried out a couple of my favourite existing pets in battle to see what powers they got, battled a couple of the low level NPC trainers. It was cool, I thought. It reminded me of Pokemon, which is one of the more solid game designs in gaming history. It was a good idea, reasonably well implemented, I thought. I could see how it would appeal to other players. Then I got distracted by Pandaria and all the other shinies and dailies and crafting and auction house, and so on.

I was wrong to dismiss pet battles; the system is rather good, entertaining and engrossing. The WoW dev team have successfully added a solid standalone separate gamestyle to their flagship MMO.And they have done it via adding depth to the popular pastime of collecting minipets, and it’s all totally optional.

This is the story of how I discovered pets, or perhaps of how pets discovered me.

So there I was, quietly levelling a new alt …

Sister Incarnadine, the undead monk, was gingerly exploring the Eastern Plaguelands – we could call it a pilgrimage through traditional forsaken domains. A journey through the history of her own folk. The Plaguelands were still dead and withered, no druids had reinvented them as they had with the Western Plaguelands. The orange-brown environment melted the eyes, along with the remnants of scourge invasion from pre-Cataclysm times that even Deathwing’s fire had not purged.

Hooking up with a travelling caravan, and two young paladins who were also on a pilgrimage to join the Argent Crusade, the monk silently faced her own private demons. It was a literal as well as meditative silence, her vows hanging heavily upon her. She silently accepted the lucky charm that the caravan driver cheerfully bestowed upon her and set about making the route safe for travellers.

When clearing bodies away from the path, she found a … curiously perky maggot feasting on one of the corpses. Picking the little fellow up (because no forsaken has a fear of maggots, and many are quite proud of the number that their rotting bodies can support, not to mention the weekly Undercity maggot racing contests), she put it in on her shoulder and forgot about it. Until “What the hell was that?!!!” she choked, as the maggot did a perky backflip over her head, landing neatly on her shoulder again.

The maggot looked innocent. No, actually, it looked pretty feisty, for a maggot.

‘Maybe I have an entry for the annual Brill maggot fighting competition after all’, thought Sister Incarnadine. ‘But first he’ll need – a training montage.’

How to get a somersaulting maggot of your own

1. Go to Fiona’s Caravan in the Eastern Plaguelands. If you haven’t started the zone yet, it will be located just across the zone borders from Western Plaguelands.

2. Do Fiona’s quests until you have progressed enough that you are invited to join the caravan in travelling to the first tower.

3. After arriving at a tower, you can click on the caravan to be offered a buff. Pick Fiona’s luck buff.

4. Go slaughter creatures in Eastern Plaguelands. Occasionally you will loot an extra lucky bag. That bag has a chance to contain Mr. Grubbs.

Life with the Thrill Kill Maggot

So the tipping point that got me back into pet battles was acquiring a bizarro blue quality pet (Mr. Grubbs) completely … out of the blue. It was then a short step towards thinking “I wonder how good this new pet is at pet battles,” and then “I’d better go train it a bit,” and then, “I could train some of my favourite pets at the same time, I always had a soft spot for the Crimson Whelpling that Arb gave me back in Vanilla.”

Then before you know it, you’re checking what other cool pets are around, reading blogs about pet battles, figuring out how to get some of the other cool pets, running the pet battle quests and dailies, trying out new pet battle teams, downloading addons, showing your pets off to other guild members in raids …

So then I found out that there was a robot cat, and had to plot to capture one. I was wandered down to Karazhan to fight the battle trainer and saw another pet I’d never seen before, turns out it only spawns in the early morning! There are pets that only spawn during the Summer/Winter, pets that only spawn when it is raining, pets that spawn rarely or in very narrowly defined areas, pets that can drop off raid bosses. Once you catch the bug (sic), there’s no going back.

For me, the combination of finding cool, unusual pets as I wander around and being able to go hunt down cool pets that I have heard about or read about somewhere else is a real winner. I would love to say I was good at pet battling but have never actually tried a PvP match yet. Still, Sister Incarnadine and her travelling menagerie are making their way through Outland with some success, and I find that wandering off to capture new pets livens up the levelling experience no end.

So: feel free to add any links to cool pet battle blogs in comments and I’ll add them to the blogroll. And if anyone talented feels like helping me come up with a winning pet battle combo that includes Mr. Grubbs, I’d love to hear it.